I am not of that leftist breed that piously proclaims that everything is open to criticism, and then, when asked to produce three major criticisms of Marx, lapses into truculent silence.

A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap wage locations in the "underdeveloped" world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether.

Modernity is not meant to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it justice.

Social democracy is one bulwark between itself and disaster.

Marx's theory of history is not a "teleological" one. A teleological theory holds that each phase of history arises inexorably from what went before.

As a materialist, Marx was chary of ideas which were divorced from historical reality, and thought that there were usually good historical reasons for this separation.

Some conservatives are utopianists, but their utopia lies in the past rather than the future. In their view, history has been one long, doleful decline from a golden age

"evolutionist" view of the future which regards it simply as more of the present. It is simply the present writ large

Marx writes wonderfully in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of the protean, shape-changing, alchemical nature of money

Labour as we know it is an alienated form of what he calls "praxis"--an ancient Greek word meaning the kind of free, self-realising activity by which we transform the world.