[...] for Marx, progress is neither modernity nor liberalism nor, even less, is it capitalism. Or, rather, ‘dialectically’, it is capitalism insofar as capitalism makes socialism inevitable and, conversely, socialism insofar as socialism resolves the contradictions of capitalism.

a fatalism by which the workers and their organizations had forged a ‘subaltern’ vision of the world for themselves

Above all, however, these various ways of representing history as a teleology presuppose the combination of two theses which are independent of one another

This point is all the more important as Marx speaks here of necessity and even of ineluctable necessity.

But this thoroughgoing change of perspective merely brings out all the more clearly the difficulties, if not indeed the aporias, this project of rationality encounters.

If we can today read Hegel’s work as something other than a long ‘theodicy’ (as he himself put it, taking the term from Leibniz) – i.e. a demonstration that ‘evil’ in history is always particular and relative, whereas the positive end for which it prepares the ground is universal and absolute – do we not owe this to the way in which that work has been transformed by Marx?

the real submission or ‘subsumption’ of labour-power: an existence for the workers which is wholly determined by the needs of capital

The importance of Marx in this connection is that, no doubt for the first time since Spinoza’s conatus (‘effort’), the question of historicity (or of the ‘differential’ of the movement, instability and tension within the present which are carrying it towards its own transformation) is posed in the element of practice

However, this project remained in abeyance, partly on account of its intrinsic aporias and partly because this was not the main problem to be confronted

However, this project remained in abeyance, partly on account of its intrinsic aporias and partly because this was not the main problem to be confronted

The collaboration of Friedrich Engels (1820–85) with Marx over forty years rules out any Manichean distinctions (e.g. between Marx the ‘good dialectician’ and Engels the ‘bad materialist’)

a recent exegete regards Lenininism as a psychopathological phenomenon