A Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique

Without denying the contradictory character of Marx’s thought, Daniel Bensaïd sets out to demonstrate that it was not a philosophy of the end of history, an empirical sociology of classes, or a positive science of economics positing an inexorable progress towards an ineluctable communism. Instead, Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ encompassed three great critiques of the scientific and political canons of its age—of historical reason, sociological rationality and scientific positivism—which make the thinker from the nineteenth century fully relevant to the twenty-first century of global capitalism. Indeed, we find here a ‘post-postmodern Marx’ able to inhabit a contemporary world replete with contingency, emergency and contradictory temporalities.

Published in France on the eve of the strikes of 1995 that signalled a profound revolt against la pensee unique , Marx for Our Times is an invitation to rediscover our foremost contemporary, Karl Marx.