It may seem odd to be reviewing a book that is now past its twelfth birthday, but the content of this book is incredibly relevant to today’s world, and a proper understanding of its virtues and failings may prove useful in light of recent events.

Many Americans seem to have a fascinating obsession with a romantic, idealized version of capitalism—one that has never actually existed. There is a tendency to believe that somehow we’ve just gotten off track—we’ve somehow lost sight of the morals, ethics, and principles that the great Founding Fathers embodied when they formed our government. “Capitalism isn’t the problem—it’s crony capitalism that’s the problem!”

The past two decades have witnessed a barrage of propaganda against Marxism and its revolutionary heritage. We examine here the most common myths about Marxism and socialism.

Ninety years ago, on 21st January 1924, Vladimir Lenin, the great Marxist and leader of the Russian Revolution, died from complications arising from an earlier assassin’s bullet. Ever since then there has been a sustained campaign to slander his name and distort his ideas, ranging from bourgeois historians and apologists to various reformists, liberals and assorted anarchists. Their task has been to discredit Lenin, Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the interests of the “democratic” rule of bankers and capitalists.

What is value? This question has perplexed the human mind for more than 2,000 years. The classical bourgeois economists grappled with the question, as did Marx. After much deliberation, they correctly hit upon the idea that labor was the source of value. This, then, became a cornerstone of bourgeois political economy, beginning with Adam Smith. On this question, there was common ground between Marx and the classical bourgeois economists.

In his masterpiece Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels pointed out that even in a “democratic republic,” wealth still wields power indirectly, but all the more surely. “It does this in two ways,” he explains, “by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange.”

There has been a huge boom in the apocalyptic movie genre with dozens of such films, television shows, video games, and books being released in just the past decade. They have used meteors, pandemics, global infertility, aliens, vampires, monsters, global warming, and zombies—the reigning champions—to depict the crumbling of society and the end of civilization. This obsession with the apocalypse is not unprecedented; there have been many periods in human history when we have seen art and culture focusing on these dark subjects. But what is it today that causes cinema to turn so gloomy about our future, and why have zombies become such a popular way to depict this future?