Marx for Our Times

Book excerpt: The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic. Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what in Marx remains dynamic and relevant in our era of accelerating economic change. Marx's theory emerges, not as a doctrinal system, but as an intellectual tool of social struggle and global transformation in a world where capital continues to dominate social relations.