Conclusion

Until now most histories of Marxism, written in European languages, have dealt with the West. These works, some of which are mentioned in our Introduction, describe and analyze the transformation of Marxist views and practices of history over the past century. Yet as we saw from the chapters included in this volume, a similarly significant change also occurred in Marxist historiography throughout the world. As many observers have noticed, today Marxism is dead. With some justification, this observation applies not only to the West but also around the world. A major reason for this is that various forms and practices of socialism occurring throughout the twentieth century have encountered serious, perhaps also insurmountable, challenges as the century drew to a close a couple of decades ago. Capitalism appears triumphant; and capitalism maintained itself, withstanding all challenges from the Parisian uprisings in 1848 and the Commune of 1871 to the Occupy Wall Street Movement of recent years. By contrast, the interlude of the Soviet Union in twentieth-century history, which was once promising and had once gathered great momentum for a number of decades, turned out ultimately to be a dismal failure. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political movements, which identified themselves as Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism but introduced the idea of the dictatorship of the party, also declined, with Vietnam, Cuba, China, and North Korea perhaps being the exceptions. Though the emphasis on party leadership found no actual basis in Marx’s political philosophy, the decline of those movements contributed to the general abandonment of those aspects of Marx’s philosophy of history that called for a materialist interpretation of the past. Moreover it became increasingly apparent that Marx’s conception of a revolutionary industrial proletariat only inadequately reflected the realities of the nineteenth, even less those of the late twentieth or the early twenty-first centuries.