Reports and discussions should be aimed at deciding whether the capitalist system still reigns—however much it may have modified itself—or whether industrial development has made the very concept of capitalism, the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist states, and the very critique of capitalism redundant. In other words, is the thesis that Marx is obsolete (a very widespread thesis in sociology) correct? According to this thesis, the world is so permeated by the previously undreamed-of development of technology that the social relation which once defined capitalism—the conversion of living work into goods, and the class separation which it brought about—has lost its relevance, if indeed it has not degenerated into a superstition. And here one may point to unmistakable signs of convergence between the most technically advanced countries, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the principal western countries class differences in living-standards and class consciousness are altogether far less in evidence than in the decades during and immediately after the industrial revolution. The prognoses of the class theory, such as the prediction of impoverishment and collapse, have not come true as drastically as they were meant to—as they must have been meant to, unless one is to deprive these predictions of most of their meaning. Even if Marx's by no means unambiguous law of falling profit rates had proved true, within the system, we should have had to concede that capitalism had discovered resources within itself which enabled the collapse to be relegated to the Greek kalends. There is no doubt that the immense increase in technological potential and the large amount of consumer goods available to all inhabitants of the highly industrialized countries are foremost among these resources. And at the same time the relations of production proved to be more elastic, in the face of this technological development, than Marx credited them with being.

The concept of revolution in Marxian theory telescopes an entire historical period: the final stage of capitalism; the transitional period of proletarian dictatorship, and the initial stage of socialism. It is in a strict sense a historical concept, projecting actual tendencies in the society; and it is a dialectical concept, projecting the counter-tendencies within the respective historical period, in as much as they are inherent in this period. These tendencies and counter-tendencies are manifestations of which Marxian theory and practice themselves are essential elements. Marxian theory itself is a power in the historical struggle, and to the degree to which its concepts, “translated” into practice, become forces of resistance, change and reconstruction; they are subject to the vicissitudes of this struggle, which they reflect and comprehend, but do not dominate. “Re-examination” is therefore an element of the concept of revolution, part of its internal development.

It is the essence of a work such as Marx's to provoke new interpretations in the course of history. His work is, in fact, at once thought, and an action aimed at transforming the human and social world. The sudden appearance of a communist world, in historically unforeseen forms, its coexistence with a capitalist world—itself quite different from its 19th century version—and the relationship between developed countries and those developing countries which were once colonies; this present state on our planet leads to new inquiries about Marxism and to a return to Marx's fundamental writings and texts, which are inseparable from Lenin's interpretations. Any reading and interpretation of Marx in a contemporary historical context is due, today, to Louis Althusser and his pupils. We are not, however, going to dwell on this actual (still unforeseable) meaning, but on some of the major themes of this interpretation. What is the “scientific,” what is this new science, historical materialism, that Marx had begun to form? what, in this light, becomes of philosophy, that is, with Marx and Lenin, dialectical materialism? and lastly what sort of relation is there between the ideologies, in a sense of which Marx is the instigator, and science or philosophy?

The 19th century, that age of bourgeois civilisation, has several major intellectual achievements to its credit, but the academic discipline of history which grew up in that period, is not one of them. Indeed, in all except the techniques of research, it marked a distinct step back from the often ill-documented, speculative and excessively general essays in which those who witnessed the most profoundly revolutionary era—the age of the French and Industrial Revolutions—attempted to comprehend the transformation of human societies. Academic history, as inspired by the teaching and example of Leopold von Ranke and published in the specialist journals which developed in the latter part of the century, was correct in opposing generalisation insufficiently supported by fact, or backed by unreliable fact. On the other hand it concentrated all its efforts on the task of establishing “the facts” and thus contributed little to history except a set of empirical criteria for evaluating certain kinds of documentary evidence (e.g. manuscript records of events involving the conscious decisions of influential individuals) and the ancillary techniques necessary for this purpose.

We readily use the term Marxism. The assumption underlying the use of this term is that a whole coherent well-knit body of ideas exists forming a system whose guiding principles, at least, were discovered by Karl Marx. This system would embrace, by right if not in fact, the whole body of intellectual, moral and even aesthetic problems that beset mankind. It would introduce a method by which to resolve them, at least to a great extent. Marxist protestations of fidelity to an open concept, according to which much is still to be discovered and even revised, are often contradicted by their opposition in matters of fact to continuation and revision. Consequently, one cannot see what fundamental distinction exists between Marxism and the classic philosophical systems, despite anything Marx and the Marxists may have said against the pretentions of the previous systems of this kind.

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx takes place in a setting which differs fundamentally from that in which his critical theses were worked out. These theses, from his “juvenilia” to Das Kapital—in turn celebrating its centenary—and the foundation of the International, changed the destiny of the world, of its peoples, States and nations. One is readily aware of the modifications in historical, economic, and political conditions, buffeted by revolutions and confrontation. But it is with difficulty that specialists—whether of theory or practice—take cognizance of other dimensions of this difference, which we consider to be fundamental to, and constitutive of, the very formulation of the theoretical problem which forms the subject of our study. Finally, however, the nationalitarian phenomenon asserts itself, day after day, as an objectively central factor in the multiform dialectics of revolutions, of evolutions, of counter-revolutions, and of apparent stagnation. Here a geographical thread is added to the historical one. But this new element is not, as some would wish it, a topographical one. The aim of the geographical dimension, or rather that of historical geography, is not to accommodate the geopolitical analysis of the contemporary world, but to serve as a framework for the emergence on the sociological level of a key concept, that of civilization, which seems to us to be necessary in order to determine the general theoretical pattern of the evolutionary process of human societies in this time of ours, the second half of the twentieth century.

What is Marx for an intellectual of the Third World? The author of some pages on pre-capitalist societies, the critic of Western society, or simply a name under whose authority it is sometimes convenient to take shelter? One could, of course, quote cases where considerations of tactics, or of erudition, were manifest; but it is not these cases that will be analysed here. It will be the cases where the intellectual of the Third World, conscious of his singularity, his culture and his past, finds himself one day forced, willy-nilly, to take Marx seriously and to define his own position by reference to Marx; and this day must come, theoretically speaking, if the intellectual in question is not an ideologist, in the worst sense of the word.

“Between the capitalist society and the communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. To this there corresponds a period of political transition in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (19, 28).

The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Marx's birth is a more propitious occasion for commemoration of him than the hundredth would have been. In May, 1918, the world was at war, and not much concerned with such ceremonies. A party of Marxist revolutionaries had just taken power in Russia, but the future of that revolution, and others like it, was still unclear. And some early philosophical writings of Marx, knowledge of which was destined greatly to deepen our understanding of the genesis and meaning of Marxism, were still lying in archives and unknown to all but a very few. It was still too soon to assess the historical significance of Marx. Now we are better situated in time to make the assessment.