Marx always predicted that the development of capitalism as a social system would be punctuated by major crises, which would become progressively deeper and broader until the system itself was swept away. What he could not have foreseen was that the development of Marxism as a theory would also be marked by crises, both of belief and of method, which have periodically threatened its survival. In this respect at least Marxism has achieved a unity of theory and practice. No crisis has been so profound for Marxism, however, as the crisis brought about by the collapse of communism in Europe after 1989. With the disappearance after seventy years of the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state and the first state to proclaim Marxism as its official ideology, Marxism as a critical theory of society suddenly seemed rudderless, no longer relevant to understanding the present or providing a guide as to how society might be changed for the better. Marx at last was to be returned to the nineteenth century, where many suspected he had always belonged.

At first sight the collapse of belief among Marxist intellectuals is surprising. After all, Marxism as a distinct theoretical perspective, a particular approach in the social sciences, and an independent critical theory had long been separate from Marxism-Leninism, the official and ossified state doctrine of the Soviet Union. The various strands of Western Marxism in particular had sought to keep alive Marxism as critical theory, and had frequently turned those weapons of criticism on the Soviet Union itself. ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ was a favourite slogan of the independent Marxist left. Indeed, what defined the so-called New Left, which emerged in the wake of the events of 1968, was not just its critique of western capitalism but its equally strong opposition to Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.

But in spite of this attempt to break free from old intellectual shackles, Marxism in general could not entirely escape its association with actually existing socialism and remained deeply marked by the historical accident of being linked in the twentieth century so inextricably with the fortunes of one particular state: the Soviet Union.