The extraordinary thing about Marxism is not its destructiveness – though, with 100 million deaths on its account, it is by far the most lethal ideology ever devised. No, the truly extraordinary thing is that, despite that monstrous record, it remains intellectually respectable. As Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs observes: “Marxists are pretty much the only thinkers who accept no responsibility whatsoever for real-world approximations of their ideas.”

Two hundred years have passed since Karl Marx was born among the sloping vineyards of the Moselle Valley, and he is still in vogue. A statue, sponsored by China, was unveiled for the occasion. Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, attended the ceremony. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, spoke at a communist festival called Marx 200. Half-clever academics the world over spent the week telling each other how “pertinent” Marx’s critique of capitalism still was.

Pertinent, I suppose, in the sense that it infects our entire political discourse. People unconsciously quote Marx all the time. Whenever you use the word “exploit” in an economic sense, or the word “bourgeois” or, come to that, the word “capitalist”, you are drawing directly on the tetchy old scrounger’s theories.

Even the class enemy has adopted chunks of his world-view. Consider the headlines in what Marx would have seen as bourgeois-capitalist newspapers, such as the Financial Times (“Why Karl Marx is more relevant than ever”), The Economist (“On his bicentenary, Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism’s flaws is surprisingly relevant”) and The New York Times (“Happy birthday, Karl Marx, you were right”). The NYT article, typically, makes just one elliptical reference to Communist countries: “There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful.”