This essay tries to address one central question that Marxism in the twenty-first century is trying to confront. This centres around one possible weakness of Marxist theory, namely, the vision of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Generations of Marxists have been inspired by the success of Marxism as a theory to accomplish a revolution, which incorporates within it a strategy to effect the breakdown of an exploitative system. This involves the Marxist understanding of leadership, organization and mass mobilization, as evident particularly in the victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. While Lenin was the architect of this practice of materializing a revolution, the effect of this vision being the formation of the Comintern in 1919, his untimely death in 1924 seriously hindered the working out of the vision of socialism as a way of life, as an alternative to capitalism. What happened thereafter was virtually a transfer of the strategy and outlook of centralization, which is the essential element in the making of a revolution, to the making of socialism itself, leading ultimately to the collapse of the USSR and its East European allies in 1991. Rapidly the impression gained ground that, while Marxism as a strategy of making a revolution has proved correct more than once, its claim to provide a better, that is, a socialist, alternative has proved to be an illusion.