A few years ago the British Broadcasting Corporation asked its radio listeners to vote for their favorite philosopher. As the votes poured in there were some obvious favorites from the start -- Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Hume and Nietzsche among them -- but as the counting started it soon transpired that there was a clear winner for the title of Britain's favorite philosopher: Karl Marx.

Not long afterwards, in late 2008, a German bookseller reported that sales of Marx's magnum opus Das Kapital were rocketing higher than they had for decades.

How was it that a radical German emigre whose ideas and predictions had been proven wrong again and again, and seemed to be laid to rest when the Berlin Wall fell, remains so popular? Why, in particular, should his works inspire so much devotion in a country that had not only rejected socialism but become one of the most free-market states in the world?

The Famous Theory

Marx's key point was that societies are in the midst of a process of evolution from less sophisticated, less fair economic systems towards an ideal final destination. Having started off in feudal states and moved on through mercantilism to the modern system of capitalism, human society would naturally soon graduate to a fairer, more Utopian system. That system, he argued, was communism.

In a communist society, property and the means of production (factories, tools, raw materials, etc.) would be owned not by private individuals or companies, but by everyone. Initially the state would own and control all
companies and institutions, running them from the top down and ensuring companies did not oppress their workers. Eventually, however, the state would 'wither away'. This, said Marx, represented the final stage of human society, when the class barriers that had stratified nations for thousands of years would dissolve.

Class Conflict

Many forms of communism had been proposed before Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engeis took it up in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. For example, in 1516 English writer and politician Thomas More sketched out a society based on common ownership of property in his book Utopia, and various communist communities had already cropped up in Europe and the United States by the early 19th century.

Marx's point, however, was that communism would be adopted en masse as workers throughout the world revolted against their governments and overthrew them to institute a fairer society. His rationale for this was that the existing system of capitalism was patently unfair, the rich -- with more capital (possessions) -- becoming richer at the expense of the average worker. He claimed that human history was a history of class struggle, with conflict between the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie (the capitalist middle class, who increasingly owned the means of production) giving way to a new conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (the working classes who labor for them).

At the heart of Marx's theories was the labor theory of value. This idea, laid out in Das Kapital (1867), states that a commodity is worth the amount of time it takes for someone to make it. So, for instance, a jacket that takes twice as long as a pair of trousers to stitch and sew ought to be worth twice as much. However, he argued, those who ran companies pocketed disproportionate amounts of the profits themselves. The reason bosses get away with this, Marx argued, is that they own the means of production and so are able to exploit their workers. There are question marks over how well the labor theory of value holds up. However, the broad thrust remains undiminished: that there is a major divide between the wealth and opportunity of those who own land and capital and of those who do not.

Anyone reading the Communist Manifesto today might be surprised that the world it describes existed over a century and a half ago. It appears to be a very modern world, a world of globalization, downsizing, massive international corporations and so forth. Marx painted a picture in which competition between capitalists would become so ferocious that eventually most would either go bankrupt or find themselves taken over by others, leaving only a small band of monopolies controlling almost the entire production system, which in turn would have almost limitless power to exploit workers. He also predicted that since capitalism was inherently chaotic, it would be prone to ever-larger booms and busts over time, causing a series of major economic slumps and large rises in unemployment. This -- coupled with the daily drudgery of doing the same repetitive job -- would eventually become too much for the proletariat to bear, and revolution would ensue.

Communism in the Modern World

At one stage in the 20th century around half the world's population lived under governments that claimed Marx as their guiding political light. However, by the end of the century only a couple of unreconstructed dictatorships remained pure communist nations. Why did the theory not stand the test of time?

In part, because Marx was wrong about the eventual evolution of capitalism. It has not descended into a monopolistic system -- at least not yet -- thanks in part to government regulation and in part to the invisible hand. The world did not become overrun with the unemployed, and, although booms and busts have continued, government control is as much to blame for these as unbridled capitalist forces.

Few if any of the countries that embraced communism following socialist revolutions could strictly be said to fit Marx's criteria -- they were mostly agrarian, low-income, undeveloped nations, such as Russia and China.
The 20th-century experiments with Marxism also underlined its inherent flaws. Most important of all, central control over an economy has proven immensely difficult to pull off -- if not impossible. When the Iron Curtain fell in the 1990s and the former Soviet states were opened up to Western eyes, it became clear that, for all the bombast of the Cold War years, they were painfully underdeveloped.

While the forces of supply and demand created dynamic economies that generated wealth at a rapid rate, the staid, centrally controlled systems in the Soviet Union and China stifled innovation. Without competition between companies -- the fundamental driving force of free markets -- the economy simply trundled along, pushed forward by bureaucrats. There was only one area where the Soviets truly excelled: military and aeronautic innovation. Tellingly, this was the only field in which there was outright competition -- in this case with the West in the Cold War.