If an author's eternal youth consists of his capacity to keep stimulating new ideas, then it may be said that Karl Marx has without question remained young.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, conservatives and progressives, liberals and social democrats almost unanimously decreed Marx's final disappearance, yet his theories have once again become highly topical — with a speed that is in many respects surprising. Since 2008, the ongoing economic crisis and the deep contradictions tearing capitalist society apart have aroused new interest in an author too hastily set aside after 1989, and hundreds of newspapers, magazines and TV or radio stations have featured Marx's analyses in "Capital" and in the articles he wrote for "The New-York Tribune," while he was observing the panic of 1857, i.e., the first international financial crisis of history.
After 20 years of silence, people in many countries are again writing and talking about Marx. In the English-speaking world, conferences and university courses on his thought are back in fashion. "Capital" is once more a best-seller in Germany, while a manga version of it has been brought out in Japan. In China a huge new edition of his collected works is being published (with translations from German and not, as in the past, from Russian). In Latin America a new demand for Marx has made itself felt among people active in politics.