Marx and Engels published their masterpiece, The Communist Manifesto, 164 years ago. Today this little book perhaps can only be found in the cellars of some second-hand bookstores, since very few people read Marx these days.

However, if one reads it again, one will astonishingly find that the Manifesto can transcend space and time and continue to yield itself to our reading in a new light. It embraces immense historical importance with its enduring insights into our contemporary development, and ironically, the Manifesto is in many ways truer today than in Marx's time.

What we are witnessing today is the globalization of world markets, technology, finance and culture. This rapid integration and uniformity bind the whole world together by fast food, fast music, and fast computers. Nation-states are forced to be part of a commercially homogenous global unity.

In many parts of the world, national identities and sovereignties are being eroded and are giving rise to global entities, with multinational companies and transnational banks.

There is an ideological compulsion to create an international common market, which in turn requires a common belief, common language, common policies, and common currency. Isn't it true that these developments were already envisioned by the Manifesto?

As Marx and Engels pointed out, "The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." Wherever the bourgeoisie go, Marx continued, they forcefully transform "tradition" into "modernity."

Marx and Engels sharply noticed that capitalism has the tendency to expand in two ways: the geographic expansion of bringing every part of the world into the capitalist sphere and the expansion of the mode of production, suppressing previously varied modes of production into one dominant form.

This was, in the view of Marx and Engels, due to the inherent nature of capitalism in which competition forces capitalists to replace labor with technology in order to outcompete small businesses, and businesses are chained together in order to share the market, sustain price competition and lead investment to overcapacity.

The systematic expansion of capitalism is maintained not only through competition, but also through the constant reproduction of new commodities and through innovations and revolutions in modern technology.

The steam engine produced the take-off of national capitalism, electricity and the combustion engine began the overseas expansion of imperial capitalism, while the atom and the Internet provide the energy for our own period of globalization. It is the production and reproduction of new commodities and technologies which makes the geographic expansion of capitalism possible.

The logic of globalization of capitalism, according to the Manifesto, is that "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." This is a perfect match with our world today.

The essence of Marxism as a theory is as a critique of capitalism and this is how Marxism should be fundamentally assessed and judged.

Marx never provided any political and economic "plan" about the transition to socialism or about how a socialist state should operate.

Historically, in many cases, "socialism" has been used by many countries as a development strategy or a regulative mechanism rather than as a political-economic system.

Therefore, contrary to the view that Marxism is a past episode in global history, the development of the world today greatly resembles what Marx and Engels wrote and predicted a century and a half ago.

All of our current global issues or problems, such as inequality, energy, environment, ecology, and food security, are actually returning to the most essential basis of the Marxist world view, the material foundations of society.

The continuous significance of Marxism, despite the post-Cold War "end of history" triumphalism, lies in its provision of a comprehensive framework for understanding and analyzing the process of social development and both national and international change.

The Marxist understanding of the inherent logic of capitalism retains its full value despite the undeniable changes capitalism has gone through in the past 164 years.

It envisioned that capitalism would eventually develop into a world system, and today this prediction has proved to be true.

As US economist Robert Heilbroner's accurately wrote of Marx in his Marxism: For and Against (1980): "Marx had the good fortune, combined, of course, with the necessary genius, to create a method of inquiry that imposed his stamp indelibly on the world."

As Heilbroner pointed out, "we turn to Marx not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable. Everyone who wishes to pursue the kind of investigation that Marx opened up, finds Marx there ahead of him, and must thereafter agree with or confute, expand or discard, explain or explain away the ideas that are his legacy."

The author is director of the Research Center on Development and International Relations, Aalborg University, Denmark. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn