For Karl Marx, it would be a moment to savour – or to mourn.

Last October, world financial leaders huddled like chastened schoolchildren in an International Monetary Fund meeting hall as the world crashed around their ears.

The man lecturing them on the error of unrestrained capitalism's ways – and its remedies, including a newspeak nationalization of banks – was IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, leading French socialist and onetime member of the Union of Communist Students.

"I was at these meetings 10 years ago," he recalled with a wry smile. "And I must say, this was different."

How different was written on the faces of the financial giants who were, since the fall of communism, the undisputed masters of the universe. A decade earlier, a scolding from an acknowledged socialist would have made them scoff. Now, they hung on every potentially world-saving word from a man who had cut his teeth on Marx.

But for those who feared that the crisis would rejuvenate communism and grind them under the heels of Marx and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, the other shoe never dropped.

"When the worldwide financial crisis came to a head in the second half of 2008," says respected communism scholar Archie Brown, "it did at least lead to an increase in sales of (Marx's) Das Kapital in Germany, but neither there nor anywhere else in Europe did it lead to a revival of Marxist-Leninist parties."

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brown says, communism is as dead as the waxen figure in Lenin's tomb.

So dead that a 70 per cent plunge in the Moscow stock market last fall left Russia's über-communists almost speechless, meekly whispering that any criticism of Vladimir Putin's government "would only harm the market."

The death of communism is largely unmourned, though it once sat astride almost one-third of the world, sweeping countries from Cambodia to Cuba.

Brown, whose encyclopedic survey, The Rise and Fall of Communism, distils 45 years of research, interviews and archival documents, has written the epitaph of an ideology that, at its passionate height, became a religion.

And, he believes, anyone seeking a way out of the current confusion by walking a hard line back to Marx and Lenin has splashed too much vodka into their Kool-Aid. The ideals of communism could never come to pass in an imperfect world, and the very drivers of the system quickly fell off the train for utopia.

Communism, Brown argues, is a philosophy that catastrophically lost its way, and only massive bloodshed and brutality kept it from an early demise. But the paradox of communism remains: Why was the system that dominated so much of the world snuffed out so swiftly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall – and why did it linger so long?

It's not that Marx died without a legacy. His clarion call for the workers to overthrow the greedy owners of the means of production was ultimately unsuccessful. But his ideals of social justice have penetrated the wealthiest countries, including the United States, which fought toe-to-toe with communism for decades.

In the 21st century, the West has adopted Marx's core belief that social progress is driven by material well-being, and social democracy has flourished.

Progressive income taxes help to redistribute wealth. The right to inherited money, in many countries, is eroded by taxation. Child labour has been banned, education is free, constitutions enshrine equality, and health and employment benefits are widespread.

It was in the U.S., too, that Marx's philosophy of materialism soared to its outer limits, as a pioneering philosophy of "toil and sweat" turned to rampant consumerism that broke all class barriers. And as globalization flooded markets with more and cheaper goods, the West embraced materialism with a zeal that put materially challenged communism to shame.

But while social democracy was accepted in the West, the hardline communism of the Soviet Union attracted relatively few converts. That, says Brown, is hardly surprising.

"The idea of building communism, a society in which the state would have withered away, turned out to be a dangerous illusion," he writes. "What was built instead was ... an oppressive party-state which was authoritarian at best and ruthlessly totalitarian at worst."

In Russia, where communism first took root and spread, the nice guys of social reform finished last. What remained was a "machine for staying in power," as the Communist Party was known by disillusioned Soviet citizens.

The party's monopoly of power was crucial to communism, says Brown. So was a centrally controlled economy and the single-minded pursuit of a global communist utopia.

Backed by a huge nuclear-armed military, it extended its tentacles well beyond Russia's borders, and after World War II became an unwieldy, inefficient and self-reinforcing system.

But paradoxically, the sticky mixture of cynicism, cronyism and corruption that held the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union, together was also responsible for its downfall.

"People learned the rules," said Brown in a phone interview from Oxford. "Self-censorship worked. If they stepped out of line they could be punished with prison or psychiatric hospitals. And the shortages (of food and consumer items) fed the communist system, because people who were in favour with the party could go to elite stores where they didn't have to join the daily queues."

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Oddly, Brown says, the most murderous period of communism, Joseph Stalin's "terror" of the 1930s, also saw a flowering of idealism, although more than 10 million lives were destroyed during that bloody period.

"There was more idealism in Stalin's time than post-Stalin. Lots of communists were ignorant of the horrors that Stalin imposed, and many joined the party thinking they would build a just, classless society."

But that hope died with Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech exposing Stalin's large-scale murder of dedicated communists. "It undermined the idea that the party was infallible," Brown says. "Many quit the party."

For communism, it was the beginning of a long, slow decline.

Khrushchev's revelations touched off a quiet explosion of cynicism, and a growing realization that the "workers' democracy" promised by Marx was not on the horizon.

When Khrushchev built large numbers of cheaply constructed apartments to free people from their cramped communal flats, he also freed them from fear of spying by their fellow tenants. In spite of a KGB network of informers, anti-communist sentiments took root in the newly acquired private spaces, and the cracks in the party's edifice widened. Underground satire and dissident literature flourished.

In a popular joke from the threadbare 1980s, a young girl sobbed helplessly as her teacher regaled the class on the splendours of the Soviet Union, where everyone was comfortable, well fed and free to enjoy life. "Why are you crying?" the teacher demanded. And the weeping girl replied, "I want to go to the Soviet Union."

"After the 1960s, fewer and fewer people believed in communism, but we were stuck with it," reflected a Moscow academic. "The motto was, `They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.'"

With the economy delivering declining rewards, and the Communist system increasingly discredited and dysfunctional, the seeds of destruction were sown. But Mikhail Gorbachev, a Communist insider and born-again reformer, reaped the whirlwind.

As the Iron Curtain frayed in Poland, Hungary and East Germany, Gorbachev refused to hold it together by force. With the Berlin Wall dismantled, and thousands of trapped East Germans pouring into the West to seek a better life, communism could not be far behind.

"In those days my grandmother was the most important part of our household," says Tanya Popova, a Moscow accountant. "If she didn't line up for food for hours a day while my mother was working, we didn't eat."

In the long run, says Brown, such a system would have disappeared. "It wasn't competing well economically, and still less well on political liberties. But without Gorbachev, the long run could have gone on much longer."

The demise of Russian communism left a gaping hole at the heart of the ideology. Europe had abandoned it. China worked its way to "state capitalism" under Deng Xiaoping. Vietnam was becoming a market economy, and only isolated North Korea and Cuba kept the faith.

Does any positive legacy remain?

"There's a high level of education in communist countries, but many others have achieved good results without it," says Brown.

"There was an advanced space program, but the same was true of the U.S. Other countries have proved that you can have a high standard of living without labour camps and one-party rule."