Will Marx make a comeback?

China has presented a statue of Karl Marx to the town of Trier in western Germany to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. People of Germany are divided over how to remember their famous son. Those who lived in East Germany before German reunification still have memories of the dreaded secret police, the Stasi. The Stasi maintained secret documents on almost every citizen and encouraged people to snitch on their families, friends and neighbors by creating terror in the minds of citizens. Although all the Stasi files are now available most people of eastern Germany would rather forget those times. It was not just the police. Information was gathered by universities, municipalities and workplaces. "No matter where one shared information, the state would put it to use." "Mutual evaluation, judgment, criticism and self-critique were omnipresent. Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state. Often to one's advantage." "The losers of this system often didn't know why their lives suddenly became derailed." Marx was born of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity because of racism and was expelled from Prussia for his radical views. Y El-Gingihy wrote a spirited defence of Marxism. "Marx's ideas had apparently been discredited with collapse of communism and consigned to Trotsky's dustbin of history." "Then came the 2008 financial crash and the demise of political economist Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history'. A decade of austerity was the death knell for the ideological vacuum." Prof A Sen wrote about the philosophy of Marx in which he picks two of Marx's "relatively neglected ideas" which were "his highly original concept of 'objective illusion', and related to that, his discussion of 'false consciousness'." In a highly exploitative society workers suffer from objective illusion wherein they fail to see that they are being exploited which is a kind of false consciousness. Surely, the same argument can be made against China where the Communist Party clings on to absolute power through a mixture of capitalism and total state control of media. On the one hand, the government is trying to restore rights to private ownership of property, on the other, it will strictly control what information or entertainment is available to people, effectively controlling how people think. Socialism and communism are more acceptable to the young people in the US than it is to the older generation. Marx has been long dead but his ideas are still generating hot debate. There will be losers in any system. Including Marxism.