Alex Callinicos examines the background to the 'crisis of marxism and its sources in the writings of the most influential marxist philosopher of the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser. He shows how Althusser's failure contributed to the rise in France of a group of anti-marxist radical intellectuals influenced by Nietzsche and centred on Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and how both they and Althusser start from many of the same premisses, including a similar philosophy of language.
The aim of this book is a vindication of classical marxism, based on an alternative reading of Marx's Capital to those of Althusser and his critics. Among the issues discussed are the materialist dialectic, the relationship between relations of production and forces of production, the nature of capitalist crisis, base and superstructure and the theory of the state. The traditional conception of objective truth is defended against Foucault and his followers. In the final chapter it is argued that the theory of state capitalism derived from Capital offers the best explanation of the patterns of economic and political crisis and social struggle which afflicts east and west alike.