Marxism’s political impact has largely been related to its ability to inspire and guide the twentieth century communist movement. The intellectual attraction of Marxism has been that it embodies a remarkable breadth of vision, offering to understand and explain virtually all aspects of social and political existence, and uncovering the significance of processes that conventional theories ignore. Politically, it has attacked exploitation and oppression, and had a particularly strong appeal to disadvantaged groups and peoples. However, Marxism’s star dimmed markedly in the late twentieth century. To some extent this occurred as the tyrannical and dictatorial features of communist regimes themselves were traced back to Marx’s ideas and assumptions. Marxist theories were, for instance, seen as implicitly monistic in that rival belief systems are dismissed as ideological. The crisis of Marxism, however, intensified as the result of the collapse of communism in the Eastern European Revolution of 1989-91. This suggested that if the social and political forms that Marxism had inspired (however unfaithful they may have been to Marx’s original ideas) no longer exist, Marxism as a world-historical force is dead. The alternative interpretation is that the collapse of communism provides an opportunity for Marxism, now divorced from Leninism and Stalinism, to be rediscovered as a form of humanist socialism, particularly associated with the ideas of the ‘young’ Marx.