This is a draft version of a speech I am due to give in the private room of a well-known London restaurant tomorrow, before an audience that will include a number of seriously rich but left-leaning businessmen, and perhaps even some cabinet-level Labour politicians. Believe me, if I told you who is likely to be there, I’d have to kill you.

To be honest, I am slightly nervous, but at the same strangely amused at the prospect of it all; and hey, even if it goes down badly, I am certain to get a damn fine lunch out of the exercise. Thursday may not see a post if I overdo the fine wine. Comrades are invited to improve my prose - and even suggest additional points - before I brush up the final text tomorrow morning. Long post alert! 2,000 words plus.

LENIN maintained in 1913 that [quote] ‘the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true’ [unquote]. That sounds a whole lot catchier than ‘Marxism is capable of yielding useful insights because it captures important partial truths’, but it is the latter conclusion that I am going to argue for today.

It is an easy enough exercise to go through classic Marxist texts and point out the passages that spectacularly haven’t panned out; some 125 years after Marx’s death, it is clear that capitalism - while indubitably heading for one of its cyclical downturns - is nowhere near the point of supposedly inevitable collapse.

Nor - in an era when two-week holidays in Thailand and 42-inch screen plasma televisions are freely available to anybody in a reasonably-paid skilled working class job - does the idea that some process of immiserisation of the proletariat is inevitable stand up to scrutiny.

Yet even now, the basic tenets of Marxism retain an intuitive appeal. In recent months, many mainstream commentators have argued that at least some of his positions are ideas whose time has come. And for the majority of the working population, there remains something plausible about the notion that capitalist social relations of production are inherently exploitative.

In October, The Times carried an article over the headline ‘Karl Marx: did he get it right?’. I doubt if they ran that one past Rupert first. Let me quote an extract:

Marx does seem to have been on to something. His basic point is that there is some good news and some bad news. He gave you the bad news first: capitalism is dreadful. The workers are exploited and the capitalists get rich at their expense. So far, so Lehman Brothers. The good news was that the bad news was bound to come to an end. Capitalism wasn't just nasty, it was doomed. It would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A bit like Lehman Brothers.

The writer concluded that Marx, at the very least, did not get things entirely wrong. And a lot has happened to capitalism, even over the last two months. But it is significant that twenty-five years ago, it would have been assumed that the average recipient of a degree-level education would not have needed such a dumbed-down restatement of the basic Marxist worldview.

The problem is, the Reagan and Thatcher revolution succeeded in relegating Marx to the ranks of also-ran philosophers of centuries past. That situation is now clearly changing, and there is a marked revival in interest in Marx‘s ideas.

In Japan, a Manga comic strip version of Das Kapital is due for imminent release, and is expected to hit the bestseller charts, with predictions that it will sell tens of thousands of copies. If it does, it will be matching the performance of Greedy Capitalism and the Self-Destructiveness of Wall Street, a book written by erstwhile Goldman Sachs high-flyer Hideki Mitani. Even a republished socialist tract from the 1930s has shipped half a million units.

In Germany, the publishing house with the rights to Das Kapital - and it’s not the easiest of works to read - reports that sales are up by a factor of 25 over the last four years. Some of the renewed interest is down to the rise of Die Linke, a leftwing breakaway from the Social Democrats. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Munich - who goes by the name of Reinhard Marx, but is no relation - has written a book that is also called Das Kapital. It has sold 15,000 copies in just a few months.

In France, sales of Das Kapital have reportedly trebled. Even in Russia, a country that has reason to distrust actions carried out in the name of Marxism, more people are said to be buying the work.

Why should this be? Well, Marxism remains the indispensable as basis of all present-day critical social thinking. In a very real sense, it provides the conceptual framework of all modern progressive politics, from social democracy to feminism to postmodernism.

Marxism’s cumulative schema of assumptions, categories and explanations - as developed over the last one and a half centuries - still represents the foundational thinking for all the sundry schools of thought that we now refer to collectively as ‘the left’.

All this, despite the argument from the political right that Marx was a ‘failed prophet’ and his most successful disciples represented little more than a vicious and dictatorial clique of third world tyrants,

Karl Marx was a German writer living in mid-Victorian London. There is no intelligible sense in which he can be held responsible for twentieth-century Russian or Chinese history. Whether one subscribes to historical materialism or not, the events that have transformed those societies are largely the work of their internal and external social dynamics

Meanwhile, Marxist thought and the wider socialist project has maintained an unparalleled hold over the some of the finest minds of the last century.

Marxism is in no sense alien to the traditions of the British labour movement. Marxists were actively involved in the foundation of many major UK trade unions, and an integral constituent of the coalition that formed the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of today’s Labour Party. Both George Lansbury and Herbert Morrison, for instance, were politically formed as members of the Social Democratic Federation.

Even the list of more recent leading Labour politicians who at one time have claimed some sort of intellectual affiliation with Marxism is long. It includes such thought leaders of our time Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Alistair Darling, John Reid and literally dozens of other Labour MPs.

Also worth noting that it was one of the last desperate tactics of the McCain campaign to brand Barack Obama a ‘Marxist‘. Fortunately that did not put Middle America off.

Why this persistent intellectual appeal? Well, there is no doubt that Marxism is the ultimate Big Idea. The sheer scale of its epistemological ambition, its insistence that in social and historical terms it is ‘the theory of everything‘, cannot fail to appeal to those who deal in ideas.

But extracting from the broad scope of the project, I’d like to look in particular at the early philosophical anthropology of the 1840s and Marx’s mature criticism of capitalism.

Alienation one of the central issues of our times. On this account – rooted in Marx’s earlier writings, but clearly present in a more developed form in Das Kapital - capital, the very product of the collective worker’s labour, comes to loom large over the collective worker.

While the nature of the UK economy has been transformed in recent decades, at the base level there is no reason to assume that jobs in call centres or routine white collar work in the financial services sector is at bottom any less alienating that the factory jobs of 40 and 50 years ago.

But equally obviously, few people in unstimulating employment need to have the concept ‘work sucks’ spelled out to them in terminology ultimately derived from the tradition German idealist philosophy.

We are seeing less working class resistance to alienated labour, at least at the level of organised trade union struggle. To a considerable extent, that reflects the major defeats for union militancy in the 1980s, especially the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1984-85.

But there are no grounds for thinking that this process is irreversible, especially at a time when a long period of capitalist boom, driven by ever-rising house prices and massively-expanded access to consumer credit, has been thrown into sudden reverse.

The fightback by public sector unions against the government-imposed pay cap - while marked by a certain degree of prevarication among the unions involved - is by no means defeated yet. The economic climate will probably force them to shut up. But it might just see them put up, too.

There is, moreover, Marx’s wider critique of capitalism. It isn’t necessary to buy in to the labour theory of value or the alleged tendency of the rate of profit to fall, on the back of a rising organic composition of capital, to appreciate the prescience of some of Das Kapital’s major arguments, especially against the contention that nothing can possibly go wrong if only we let the market do its stuff.

This is a time when governments in many countries have had to adopt an overnight U-turn when it comes to some of the free market orthodoxies of the last period. Banks have been nationalised and the longstanding taboo against raising the top rate of income tax has been broken.

In this country, commentators on the centre right have been driven to obvious despair; the pages of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail - and don’t forget, these are often newspapers to which the government defers - have been filled with accusation that Old Labour is back from the undead, and even that Gordon Brown has instituted a Soviet Britain. They are not joking; that is honestly how they see it.

This is entirely nonsensical, of course. Any operative definition of socialism certainly involves redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, not the handing of shedloads of cash to bail bankers out of a crisis of their own making.

These measures constitute Keynesianism in the technical sense of fiscal stimulus, but clearly do not correspond to a full-scale return to the post-war consensus or social democratic ideology as such. In other spheres than banking, privatisation continues unabated, and there is little evidence of direct job creation.

However, they do mark the first shift away from the neoliberal consensus to which both Conservative and Labour governments have been habituated since 1979, and from the leftwing viewpoint, that has to be welcome. This is a turning point.

But does Marxist economics provide an understanding of capitalism superior to that offered by its mainstream counterpart? Are those of us who have mastered its basic texts about to emerge as infallible pundits in 24/7 media demand, thanks to a command of Gnostic wisdom denied to the Harvard MBAs at Goldman Sachs?

The conclusion has to be that – unsurprisingly – there are limits to what any book published in 1867 can tell us about the reality of 2008. If the Marxist left did indeed have any actionable special insight into the real workings of the capitalist system, pensioned-off lefties would have been ten a penny on Wall Street when it was still hiring.

Moreover, it is impossible to carry out serious empirical economic research within Marxist categories. Given the way that economic data is collected, one cannot calculate the organic composition of capital or the rate of exploitation, for instance, in anything other than approximate terms.

It is rather better to understand Das Kapital not as a body of operational economic wisdom, but as a substantial philosophical critique of what happens when capitalism is left to its own devices. Marx’s project was very much to take the ideological presuppositions of the classical political economists, and take them to a reductio ad absurdum.

But capitalism has for most of its existence not been unchecked. It wasn’t totally unchecked in 1867, and is far less so today. Even Britain’s emasculated trade unions can provide millions of workers with elementary protection against capitalist excesses, within a legal framework designed to provide just that.

At the theoretical level, even capitalists know they need effective consumer demand, although that doesn’t stop them imposing de facto pay cuts on their own workforces where they can get away with it.

So within our intellectual framework, what can we add to the debate about capitalism that is now starting for a new generation? Perhaps the most important argument the Marxist left can hammer home is our insistence on the cyclical nature of capitalism as an economic system. Gordon Brown really thought he had abolished boom and bust; it looks like he is just about to find out that he was badly wrong on that one.

Sadly for us, Marx died before he got round to drawing up a definitive account of his theories on these matters. Anything we say on this score has to be constructed indirectly. But the tens of millions that will find themselves out of work across the advanced capitalist countries in the years ahead will make the case more eloquently then words ever will.

Moreover, there is a surprisingly deep ecological vein to be found in Capital, too. Marx very much sees the way in which humanity reproduces itself as being based on the interaction of human labour on nature. Much of it is pertinent at a time when the future of the planet is at stake.

Finally, we can show how the market cannot deliver public goods, despite New Labour’s insistent reliance on such mechanisms. There is no country in the world in which universal education or healthcare is provided without the substantial intervention of the state. We have to transcend the logic of the market and impose the political economy of the working class in its place, crisis or no crisis.

Marx is still a thinker from whom much can be drawn. In Britain, anyway, we haven’t got the level of class struggle it would take to operationalise from theory to practice, and we are handicapped by the ingrained sectarianism of most of the far left. But on a worldwide scale, there are no obvious obstacles in the way of a widespread movement back to basics.