One interesting—some would say surprising—aspect of the ongoing discussions and debates about globalization is the renewed interest being shown in the ideas of Karl Marx, which only recently seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. In the journalistic and academic worlds alike, a number of reappraisals of Marx's work are appearing that identify the 19th-century thinker as “the prophet of globalization” because of his focus on capital's inherent drive for self-expansion and technological innovation on the one hand and its tendency to exacerbate social inequality and instability on the other. Even some of globalization's most fervent supporters note the importance of Marx's work for anticipating the imbalances and disturbances associated with the unfettered expansion of global capital. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for the passionately pro-capitalist magazine The Economist, put it in their new book A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, “As a prophet of socialism, Marx may be kaput; but as a prophet of 'the universal interdependence of nations,' as he called globalization, he can still seem startlingly relevant...his description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.”

Some may find such talk of Marx a bit odd, given the abject failure of the communist regimes that claimed to rule in his name. Yet as Marx scholars have long pointed out, the communist regimes had little in common with Marx's actual ideas. Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy (he called those who advocated it “crude and unthinking communists”); he passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical journalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the notion that a small "vanguard" of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without the democratic consent of its citizens. If anything, the collapse of communism seems to have spurred new interest in Marx, since it makes his predictions concerning the global reach of capitalism seem even more timely.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge contend that “one of the things that Marx would recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox that he spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more it seems to whip up its own backlash.... The undoing of globalization, in Marx's view, would come not just from losers resenting the success of the winners but also from the winners themselves losing their appetite for the battle.” “There is even a suspicion,” they go on, "that globalization's psychic energy—the uncertainly that it creates which forces companies, governments, and people to perform better—may have a natural stall point, a movement when people can take no more."

The tone of much of the current discussion of Marx on the part of both supporters and critics of globalization was established by John Cassidy's 1997 New Yorker article “The Return of Karl Marx,” in which he called Marx “the next big thinker.” Cassidy cited a high-placed Wall Street investment banker who told him, “The longer I spend time on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right.” Today's pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like to mention the buzzword 'globalization' at every opportunity—without realizing that Marx was already on the case in 1848. Two issues make Marx especially relevant in his view: one, Marx's notion that even in the most propitious economic conditions, the laborer under capitalism is compelled to endure overwork and “the reduction to a machine, the enslavement to capital”; and two, Marx's insistence that once capital becomes the predominant formation in any society, “what is truly human becomes congealed or crystallized into a material force, while dead objects acquire meaning, life and vigor.”

The consensus on the part of most commentators is that while Marx may have been right about the nature of capitalism, he was less correct about the practicality of the alternative he envisioned. Yet in light of the way Marx is gaining increased attention from many who only a short time ago thought that history had pronounced his ideas dead, his work may continue to illuminate the quest to understand life under the “manic logic” of global capitalism. As Marx once put it, “We are firmly convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous, whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken possession of our minds...are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to them.”