"The serious intellectual crisis of Marxism was not the reason for the collapse of the Communist states. However, the failure of what the Soviet Communists under Lenin and Stalin had fashioned and presented as the Marxist model for an economic system joined its political to its intellectual crisis. The Soviet Communist Party labelled Marxist-Leninist theory a ‘science’. Marxist-Leninist theory could, allegedly, predict outcomes but science cannot do so for human society. The contrast created a problem for Marxist-Leninist thinkers that was philosophical, methodological, epistemological and psychological. The sterility of intellectual thought surrounding Soviet Marxist-Leninism was profound. There was no infusion into Soviet Marxism from the Frankfurt School, or the relatively liberal Italian Communist Party, or the British Marxist School, or Latin American Liberation Theology, or Chinese developments towards a more liberal economic order. Soviet Marxist-Leninism remained ideologically autarkic until the late 1980s and, when it no longer chose to do so, it fell apart and Soviet Party members by the millions discarded their Party cards. Nevertheless, the collapse of Communism was largely due not to this intellectual failure, but to the specific political and economic circumstances of the 1980s. Moreover, the possibility of a different trajectory, and thus the value of counterfactual speculations that probe such possibilities, was exemplified by developments in China. There, the introduction of capitalism proved compatible with the Communist rule that was maintained by the availability of force and, in 1989, by the willingness to use it. As a further reminder that ideological issues should be set in context, the problems of Soviet Communism were to be matched in post-Communist Russia. The situation then, now capitalist (of a type) and democratic (of a form), was, in practice, like the earlier Communist system. There was a reliance on informal networks, personalised loyalty notably to Putin, and the exchange of favours, all of which sapped institutional effectiveness. As under Communism, assets were not properly costed, while private property was at risk."