The central point is obvious and stunningly overlooked; the miserable flotsam of our society that can hardly organise itself to get out of bed in the morning and lives a precarious existence from hand to mouth, needle to vein, ends up behind bars whereas shareholders and corporate executives on their behalf who cut corners resulting in mass murder are fined nugatory amounts for their lack of trouble.

For just as legislators, charmingly imprisoned by the rich, impose inestimably nastier imprisonment on the poor, so the great powers march over Kosovo and East Timor but eat thousand-year-old quails' eggs in the Great Hall of the People.

Marx, perhaps more misunderstood than any other major writer for not having been read by his detractors, has been reviled for many things done after his death in his name by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest but historians can rightly observe that his central thesis about how the revolution would overthrow capitalism was hopelessly optimistic, though it was no more a miscalculation than the mindlessly celebrated Fukuyama.

On the other hand, on the general theory of labour and what would happen if capitalism proceeded unckecked, Marx was prescient to such a degree that his humanity could hardly have withstood the tragedy. As kleptocracy, dressed in the self-important intellectual fripperies of Hayek, has been practiced on a methodical and global scale which makes the Mafia look like a gang of downtown windscreen cleaners, liberalism in all other matters is being equally methodically eroded. There never has been a convincing case for economic liberalism in tandem with social repression; to maintain the right to kick an unemployed labourer in the economic groin and then punish him for starting the fight is simply advancing a sham, made respectable by the suffix of an "ism" to justify greed.

As a painstaking, near fanatically rabbinical historian and historiographer, Marx's word can be taken for the first half of his aphorism because, in a counter-intuitively uniform way, it is the weak who are most cruel in the exercise of power. Capitalism goes to war armed with the lethal trident of greed, cruelty and sentimentality.

What Marx would not recognise in our society is the rise and rise of the bourgeoisie. It is currently weak in the face of plutocratic rapine but there are significant straws in the wind:

• the issue of food safety will not go away;
• the Internet will make billions for some but its cartelisation will be impossible;
• an inexorable rise in university education will produce more articulate critics than self-serving charlatans; and
• the very near monopolies that have been created will create their own form of fragility which will, in turn, require a degree of social coherence and consent of which repression is a poor guarantor.

Ironically, this is a true example of Marxist structural theory in which every thesis has an antithesis which results in a synthesis, a component of which is the notion that every thesis bears within it the seeds of its own destruction.

I may, like Marx, be indulging in hopeless optimism.

I recognise that civilisation is skin deep, that the fabric of checks and balances is much easier to tear than to weave; that since the 'false dawn' of 1968 - from revolution in Paris to 'free love' in California - we have been subjected to a cynical tide of materialism, culminating with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

But, if previous fins de sieclesand new centuries are to be replicated, we are due for a millennial, global movement of creativity, re-casting and optimism replacing cynicism, ennui and passivity.

This will not, of course, put an end to 'sin', venality or vulgarity; the greedy shall be greedy and the cruel cruel ,but fewer of us will stand by.

As we recognise our own weakness in the face of global forces we will react as the biological animals we are; we will fight back.

Social Darwinism cuts both ways.