Also Badiou was doing his best work before the Soviet Union fell. For all of Stalin's crimes it's not so clear Russia was going to survive the 50 years 1917 in retrospect and it developed from a economically and politically backward country with a few culturally advanced spots [1][2] to an economic, technological and political rival to the US. People in "non-aligned" countries like India and Egypt could only wish they could develop that quickly.

Academically, Marx was ahead of his time even if his prophecy that capitalism would be smashed by "the tendency for the rate of profit to decline" and the labor theory of value turned out to be bunk. He was popular in the 20th centuries and even David Bell chair of the social sciences department of Harvard and as ardent a supporter of the status quo as there ever was claimed to be Marxist. [3]