ABSTRACT
The negligible influence of Karl Marx on the contemporary Left is understandable but lamentable. It is understandable because, for all but a handful of specialist scholars, Marx’s reputation became inextricably intertwined with twentieth-century state communism, so that when the latter collapsed the former’s reputation went with it. For once political and social rights have been attached to some people simply in virtue of their humanity, then exceptions to the principle always need to be defended. Slavery in the nineteenth-century USA was ideologically vulnerable in a way in which slavery in the ancient and medieval world was not. Slave owners in the American South probably treated their slaves very similarly to the way slave owners in ancient Rome or Byzantium or in the medieval Ottoman Empire treated theirs. Marx was consistent in believing, not merely that there had been material preconditions for what had happened in the past, but that there were such preconditions for things happening in the future.
